Following the success of a workshop at the 2023 Suicide Prevention Australia conference, Standby Support after Suicide aim to build on the feedback and insights received and once again engage its audience in an authentic and meaningful way. This symposium will challenge the unconscious bias that can still be present within the sector, introducing a video presentation, hearing perspectives from Lived Experience Workers and Counsellors who are at the heart of providing support to individuals and communities bereaved by suicide. These videos will illustrate the power imbalance that can still exists and identifying synergies between these two vital support systems.
For the past 21 years StandBy have been providing social, emotional, physical, environmental and spiritual support to those bereaved and impacted by suicide. With additional funding to enhance the program both a counselling and lived experience workforce have been developed and implemented throughout 2023. The symposium will be led by StandBy’s leaders in Lived Experience and Counselling, outlining the learnings, challenges and successes in providing wholistic wrap around support.
There is often continuing biases - clinical versus lived experience. This presentation will educate and guide others towards collective courage by working together and keeping people’s self- determined needs at the forefront of it of services. Through collaboration, conversation and seeking to understand the role and value each worker can bring, it enables us to accelerate impact and best serve those we seek to support.
We aim to have our audience question their (or their organisations) preconceived ideas or their worldview and challenge their own ideas and ways of providing services. The theme of “collective courage” is particularly relevant to the symposium because supporting those bereaved by suicide should not be either lived experience or counselling, it can be both, it can be either and it can change from day to day, week to week, or month to month. Ultimately this should be guided and driven by the person bereaved by suicide and our role is to walk alongside them. There will be insights from both workforce streams identifying needs outside their own area of expertise and strategies to work collectively.
We aim to elicit conversations that people will approach with curiosity an open mindedness well beyond the presentation, it will be a powerful tool in uniting those from across the sector, dispelling myths and using real life stories as evidence that working together can truly accelerate impact and save lives.